Re: loading firmware while usermodehelper disabled.

Alan Cox
2012-01-02T23:59:51Z

On Mon, 2 Jan 2012 13:27:03 -0800
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 1:19 PM, Matthew Garrett <mjg@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 12:48:48PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >
> >> Why are you guys making it any more complicated than that?
> >
> > Because it's inadequate. You can't guarantee that we ever loaded
> > firmware.
>
> If we didn't load the firmware before the suspend, then the resume
> function of a device sure as hell had better not load it at resume
> time either.

Get a clue. It is very common that devices keep firmware over OS warm
boots, particularly if onboard. "Lesser" beings than yourself consider it
a feature of good hardware design for fast booting and it works happily
in "lesser" OS products such Windows.

If you'd like a typical worked example the Fujitsu Q550 has a 3G modem on
it. So in the following cases we don't load firmware at boot but we do
need to after hibernate/resume

Boot windows, reboot to Linux
Boot Linux, reboot to Linux (first loads, second doesn't)

Break that and you have a regression and Linus says regressions are wrong
and we don't do them.

> And don't make the stupid argument that we don't know. That's just
> inane. Either the driver loads the firmware at startup, or it doesn't.

Wrong.

> Fix the 99%. Screw the crazy shit, don't even bother worrying about it
> until *after* the 99% is fixed.

This is the 99%. This is PC hardware, the 99% is crazy shit.

Alan